Gigapixel captures every person at Super Bowl 52

Fans, members of the media and anyone else who was among the 67,612 or so packing U.S. Bank Stadium to take in Super Bowl 52 can now prove that they were at the big game.

Author:
Dana Thiede

Published:
1:31 PM CST February 7, 2018

Updated:
1:31 PM CST February 7, 2018

MINNEAPOLIS - Talk about an awesome keepsake.

Fans, members of the media and anyone else who was among the 67,612 or so packing U.S. Bank Stadium to take in Super Bowl 52 can now prove that they were at the big game, thanks to an awesome piece of technology called an interactive gigapixel panorama.

Minnetonka-based Blakeway Panoramas posted the gigapixel Wednesday. It allows you to zoom all the way in to your seat or field position and tag yourself for posterity. Blakeway creates these works by having a photographer or multiple photographers take shots of the sky, field, and other things that won't change before the contest begins. Then at a quarter break or some other extended stoppage in the action photographers have to quickly and accurately cover the crowd and seating area of the stadium to complete the panorama, which is actually composed of more than thousand individual shots and billions of pixels.

Amazingly, owner James Blakeway says it's a process they've got down to about two minutes and forty seconds.

"If we do it at a quarter break, you're really eating up that whole quarter break. You cannot mess that up so it's 'shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot,' and you just knock these images out," he said.

While the end result is quite high-tech, Blakeway said the cameras they use aren't that sophisticated. He described it as professional gear, but off-the-shelf equipment.